This book examines the 1920s and 1930s as a critical juncture in the history of the Russian reception of Laurence Sterne, author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759-1767) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). Drawing on extensive archival research, it traces how this eighteenth-century Yorkshire writer and clergyman was read and admired within an increasingly totalitarian society. By placing individual encounters with Sterne's works within wider biographical, cultural, and institutional contexts, the book analyses Sternean reception as part of the larger history of the survival of intellectual autonomy after the October Revolution.

It is difficult to imagine a phenomenon more at odds with the Bolshevik vision of society than the whimsical world of Laurence Sterne; yet, as this book shows, it is precisely this incongruity that makes Sterne—whom Goethe and Nietzsche described as "the freest writer"—a revealing figure for understanding cultural life in the early Soviet period. The book introduces a wealth of previously unknown materials, including translations, marginalia, scholarly studies, illustrations, and private letters. It also reassesses Viktor Shklovsky's lifelong fascination with Sterne and reconstructs the careers and intellectual environments of lesser-known early Soviet literary critics and translators.